Washington D.C., Mar 13, 2019 / 04:00 pm (CNA).- The Department of Education will no longer enforce a provision that forbids religious organizations from providing federally-funded educational services to private schools. The decision was announced in a March 11 letter addressed to congressional leadership.
“Those seeking to provide high-quality educational services to students and teachers should not be discriminated against simply based on the religious character of their organization,” wrote Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in the Monday letter.
“The Trinity Lutheran decision reaffirmed the long-understood intent of the First Amendment to not restrict the free exercise of religion,” she wrote, referencing the 2017 Supreme Court decision in the case Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer.
That decision found that the state of Missouri acted illegally in not awarding Trinity Lutheran Church a grant for resurfacing a playground located at its preschool and daycare center. The grants were awarded to similar, but non-religious, organizations. Trinity Lutheran was denied solely because it has a religious affiliation.
In the decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court said that Missouri had violated the First Amendment by denying the grant to to the church.
Citing the decision, DeVos said the department will stop enforcing the specific provisions in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)–sections 1117(d)(2)(B) and 8501(d)(2)(B)– that prevent religious groups from providing specific services, including tutoring, special education programs, and mentoring.
The ESEA says that those enrolled in both public and private schools must receive “equitable services,” which can be provided by contractors. Until the Monday announcement, those contractors could not belong to any sort of religious organization, and in the case of private schools they must be independent of the school.
In the letter addressed to Congressional leadership, DeVos said these two provisions were unconstitutional.
“After consultation with the Department of Justice, I have concluded that the requirement in ESEA sections 1117(d)(2)(B) and 8501(d)(2)(B) that an equitable services provider be ‘independent of . . . any religious organization’ impermissibly excludes a class of potential equitable services providers based solely on their religious status, just like the State policy that was struck down in Trinity Lutheran,” said DeVos in the letter.
The secretary said that the exclusion of religious organizations by virtue of their beliefs constituted a “status-based prohibition” that “cannot be justified.”
DeVos wrote that allowing both religious and secular organizations to provide these services would not violate the Establishment Clause, and that “the Department generally considers faith-based organizations to be eligible to contract with grantees and subgrantees and to apply for and receive Department grants on the same basis as any other private organization.”
All other provisions of the ESEA, including that the equitable services provided be “secular, neutral, and nonideological” would still be enforced, DeVos said.
Mark Rienzi, president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and a professor at the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law, told CNA that he believes the change is “actually constitutionally required.”
“What the Department of Education said was they understand that the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s recent decisions about the Constitution make clear that the government can’t exclude religious people and religious organizations from participating in otherwise neutral programs,” Rienzi told CNA.
Rienzi explained that it would be different if the government were hiring people to preach religion or to celebrate Mass, but in this case, it involves hiring teachers from a religiously-affiliated school to teach secular subjects, such as English as a second language classes.
“What the Department of Education said is that the Constitution does not allow the government to exclude religious groups and religious organizations from participating on equal terms with everybody else in those kinds of programs,” he explained.
The idea that the government forbids religious groups from equal participation in programs is “just not the law,” he said.
Rienzi compared the past Department of Education policy to one that would forbid the fire department from putting out a fire at a church.
“The church is a building in town just like the library, the bookstore, and the drugstore and everything else. And of course, the government can and should provide equal services and let them participate on equal terms with everybody else.”
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Ugh.
Dick’s Sporting Goods, Starbucks, Levi Strauss, Amazon, Yelp, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Tesla, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Mastercard, Lyft, Disney, Meta, Comcast, Airbnb, Patagonia, Doordash, Paypal, Reddit, Meta, Zillow and Uber, with more probably to come.
Now the lines are truly drawn – let the battle begin.
We won’t be buying that treadmill ($1000+) from Dick’s after all. We wrote the Investor Relations contact to inform them of why.
The partial LIST from A to Z: Amazon, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Levi Strauss & Co., Starbucks, Yelp, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Tesla, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Mastercard, Lyft, Disney, Meta, Comcast, Airbnb, Patagonia, DoorDash, PayPal, Reddit, Meta, Uber and Zillow. The embedded link adds three more: Condé Nast, Buzzfeed, and Apple.
An earlier LIST: Overlapping this partial Dishonor Roll were the more than 400 corporations who in 2015 filed amici briefs in favor of gay “marriage.” Together they spontaneously (!) filed their legal argument on separate letterheads, asserting a constitutional right to the oxymoron same sex “marriage.” As broadly reported and rewarded in the media, AT&T and Verizon, Dow Chemical, Bank of America, General Electric, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, and the San Francisco Giants, were among nearly four hundred agenda-assimilated corporations and business organizations that weighed in.
The SCAM in 2015: stock market numbers might benefit infinitesimally from spending patterns! So, the business world gave an entirely new meaning to the term: bottom line! The blip of one billion dollars pencils out as 1 in 6,620 of one percent of the federal budget in 2021 ($6.82 Trillion, while the GNP is nearly four times this figure at $25 Trillion).
Today, the reasoning will be the avoided cost of treating pregnant women like women who are carrying a child.
The pygmies and cannibals are in charge.
This is a throwback to the fugitive slave acts.
Aren’t they being a little presumptuous?
Are they offering an equivalent amount to women who want to keep their babies? Choice and all that.
The most egregious example of this I have seen in Hello Bello, which offer “premium” baby itesm (diapers, wipes, suncreen, etc) direct to your door (I guess they do have store fronts in a few locales). Buy diapers, pay for abortions.
.
It is cheaper to pay for the elimination of an employee’s baby than to give them Family Leave/Maternity Leave or whatever. And much cheaper than to help pay for FL/ML after IVF treatments, so yeah, I suspect nearly any company with (gov’t mandated) health insurance will pay for abortions. It is simply looking out for the bottom line.
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https://notthebee.com/article/hello-bello-is-the-latest-company-offering-to-pay-for-their-employees-abortionswith-money-made-selling-diapers
The fact is that this is purely a money-saving move cloaked in politically correct garments. Now they can be praised in all the right quarters for saving significant expenditures on things like insurance and parental or sick leave.
This is very revealing. And damning.
The culture of death writ large. Support death but disappear when life makes demands.
STOP! HATING! BABIES!
Business people aren’t stupid. Why would they pay for the mass murder of what would soon become paying customers if there wasn’t some immediate incentive to do so?